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Trimming after melt

David Shanahan

David Shanahan

Member
Joined
12 Aug 2013
Messages
267
Location
Northern Moor, Manchester
I think I'm getting on top of the melt that happens to the Staurogyne and Hygro Cory as they settle in to being submerged, but now I have big stalks with leaves growing on top, so what's the best thing. Let them recover on their own, or give em the chop and replant the tops and hope the stalks are strong enough to recover?
 
or give em the chop and replant the tops and hope the stalks are strong enough to recover?
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I vote for this. The bottom melting part will not recover, or take longer to recover if it pulls through and tries to grow a secondary stalk from the bottom. I suppose that depends on species. The melting can affect the entire plant eventually faster than it can grow. By the time I figured that out I was left with two stalks from species with just a couple of leaves each, almost no stalk left to plant into the substrate.
 
Planty said:
I think I'm getting on top of the melt that happens to the Staurogyne and Hygro Cory as they settle in to being submerged, but now I have big stalks with leaves growing on top, so what's the best thing. Let them recover on their own, or give em the chop and replant the tops and hope the stalks are strong enough to recover?
Click to expand...
Do as you wish but you need to improve your CO2/flow/distribution and you should probably reduce the light intensity. Add Excel or whatever equivalent product is available.

Cheers,
 
I had all sorts of melting problems with my tank in the first few months.
Tried all sorts of different flows and distribution, there was more then enough Co2 getting in the tank.
Somehow it (Co2) never really got to the plants, after Ceg's advice to start adding liquid carbon to the tank the whole tank started to explode in a healthy growth.
I add 5-7ml a day on 300 litres, still adding Co2 with a fire extinguisher and dosing with the estimated index (EI)

Ceg has been my saviour, follow his advice please, its the best advice you can get when you are starting out!
My newbee faults were being stubborn, not the correct flow and to much light!
IMG_4433_zps3b6ded0b.jpg
 
your filters should have the capacity of ~10x of the tanks volume.
So for a 300 liter tank you should have 3000 liters per hour as filtering capacity.
The real capacity of a cannister filter is always lower as described on the box.
It is measured with no filter media and no hoses or hight difference.

Fiddeling with spraybars and different flows is my suggestion, do not hook them both on to a single spray bar, just use two separates.
good luck with finding the solution!
Adding a bit liquid carbon did wonders for me.
 
Right then. Spent a bit of time this weekend fitting spray bars to my tank. I have two of them. They are both situated at the back spraying forward. The flow moves accross the top then down the front of the tank and across the substrate.

The tank empty is 275 litres. I have 2650lph of pumping power, though I'm probably going to replace the all pond solutions on for a 2000lph instead of the 1400lph as it doesn't seem all that strong.

I have ordered some flourish excel which should be here in a day or so and an up co2 atomizer to go on my stronger pump to get a bit better co2 spread now the flow is vastly improved. Hopefully that should help tackle some of my issues. Will keep you posted.
 
Got the flourish. Started dosing twice recommended amount. Also purchased an up inline atomiser. After about an hour of thinking it wasn't working I turned down the filter flow to see tiny tiny bubbles coming through the spray bar. So running the filter at full pelt and looks like I'm getting 100% dissolved into the water before it gets out the spray bar.
 
OK, so your mentioned that there was a another pump to supplement flow, or was that the rating of a single filter pump? If there is a secondary pump then it needs to be placed on that back wall as well, pointing in same direction as the spraybar.

Cheers,
 
OK, got it.🙂

It doesn't look like the jets are actually making it to the front glass. It looks like they fall just short. That might just be an optical illusion of the photo though. In any case this should be an improvement.

Cheers,
 
No worries mate. It's just my own personal rule of thumb, but I like to have enough force to have the jets making strong contact with the front glass. It might be that you have too much filter media?

Here's my standard illustration:
8396953793_920569535d_c.jpg

Cheers,
 
Possible on the 1400 litre filter, It's rammed. Running the standard stuff that came with the Eheim, but emptied one of the trays that was full of those plastic hoops and half filled it with carbon about a week ago. Both have a fine filter sponge at the top level so maybe they could be restricting the filters?
 
The restrictions usually come from the ceramic components. They are designed to slow the flow, especially the hoops. You really do not need that much media. You could remove all the ceramic and replace it with the generic blue foam if you wanted to. Try removing half of everything and see if it improves the flow. Flow throughput is far more important than media type, or media amounts.

Cheers,
 
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